I have discussed certain aspects of Ong's 1981 book in my 3,500-word OEN article "Walter J. Ong on Historical and Other Humanistic Studies" (dated September 10, 2023):
But here is the key passage from Ong's 1981 book that I quote in my 3,500-word OEN article from Ong's important subsection "Procedures: Understanding and Asymmetric Opposition" in his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (pp. 29-34):
"The Procedure here [in Ong's 1981 book], like virtually all interpretations of historical developments, is to work from hypotheses. These hypotheses are sometimes declared but often simply implied. The hypotheses cannot always be articulated in full. Not infrequently, in studies of historical developments and in other humanistic studies, hypotheses are far more explicit at the conclusion of the work than at the beginning. The hypotheses may first reveal themselves at the end as 'conclusions.' The reason for this deferred fuller articulation of hypotheses appears evident enough. The hypotheses in historical and other humanistic studies are usually complex in the sense that they contain a great many interrelated and nuanced details, so that they cannot be adequately stated until a large body of discussion has been assimilated, and also in the sense that they commonly leave generous margins of what has been called 'productive ambiguity.' Generally speaking, in such historical interpretations as this book [Ong's 1981 book] proposes, there can be no total verification of the sort that the natural sciences commonly achieve and that the social sciences frequently ambition (but seldom achieve) for the reason that in material of the sort considered here [in Ong's 1981 book], total verification would mean massive and disastrous fragmentation of observations and data and all but certain trivialization of categories, as well as impossible complications in the conclusions. This is not to say that verification should not be attempted or is not attempted at all - it should be worked out to the absolute maximum practicable. Nor is it to say that massively verified conclusions available from various sciences or quasi-sciences should not be respected, for they are often invaluable and should also be used to the maximum whenever they are relevant, pro or con" (Ong, 1981, p. 30).
Now, in the present essay, I want to focus on Ong's emphasis on biological gender differences in his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness.
Inasmuch as Ong sees certain gender differences as biological, not just cultural and social, his views are not compatible with French's cultural views.
I have drawn on Ong's views on certain key biological gender differences in my article "The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric" in College English, volume 40 (1978-1979): pp. 909-921.
I have also drawn on Ong's views in my essay "Faulkner and Male Agonism" in the book Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong, edited by Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestrraat (Susquehanna University Press and Associated University Presses, 1998, pp. 203-221).
In a nutshell, in Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness, he suggests that human males are psychologically more insecure than human females are. However, he does not deny that human females are also insecure.
Here's an image that I would propose to illustrate what Ong means by "more insecure": If it were possible to quantify and measure human insecurity, we would expect that the measures of human male insecurity would be distributed and represented by a bell-shaped curve. Similarly, the measures of human female insecurity would also be distributed and represented by a bell-shaped. However, the mean distribution of those two bell-shaped curves would be statistically significantly different.
Ah, but would Pope Francis be impressed enough by Ong's account of gender differences to call people's attention to Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness? Your guess is as good as mine about this. Ong's 1981 book was translated into Spanish - which Pope Francis speaks - in 1982.
(Article changed on Mar 06, 2024 at 9:48 AM EST)
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